An
anonymous, gaunt young man (Le Van Loc) pedals his rented cyclo (pedicab)
through the crowded streets of Ho Chi Minh city (modern day Saigon)
in search of a fare, stopping periodically to rest and to clean away
the grime and dust of pollution from his feet. It is a legacy of meager
livelihood that has been passed down from his beloved father who was
killed years earlier when a motor vehicle collided with his own cyclo.
But the young cyclo perseveres despite his impoverished existence
through the devotion of his family. His proud grandfather (Le Kinh
Huy), continues to repair tires despite his failing health, unwilling
to take advantage of a fortuitous, misdelivered package that could
be implemented towards an alternative, and less physically demanding
source of income for his advanced age. His younger sister (Pham Ngoc
Lieu) joins other poor, enterprising children sitting alongside the
walls of restaurants shining patrons' shoes. The older sister (Tran
Nu Yen-Khe) earns a modest living by delivering water to local grocers
and working as a cook. It is an austere, yet honest existence that
would unexpectedly come to an end when the young man's cyclo is stolen
by an organized gang, and is severely beaten by thugs when he instinctively
chases after them through the city streets. He pays a visit to his
employer (Nhu Quynh Nguyen), an inscrutable middle-aged woman who
dotes on her mentally deficient adult son (Bjuhoang Huy) in order
to seek leniency and make arrangements for repaying the lost cyclo.
The employer seizes the opportunity to recruit the hapless cyclo into
her other criminal dealings by assigning him to a brooding gang leader
with an affinity for poetry (Tony Leung Chiu Wai). The poet detains
him at a nondescript upper floor tenement apartment away from home
and the support of his family, and the cyclo is tasked to perform
criminal acts in exchange for payment in US currency. However, when
the cyclo's beautiful sister is forced into prostitution by the charismatic
poet, the two siblings find themselves struggling to retain their
humanity and dignity against an increasingly desperate and inescapable
future in the underworld.

Tran Anh-hung presents an evocative
and harrowing portrait of corruption, alienation, and dissolution
of family in Cyclo. As a Vietnamese
expatriate living in France, Tran interjects surreal imagery with
shots of urban decay and human misery in an attempt to reconcile his
own childhood memories of Saigon with the reality of contemporary
urban life in Ho Chi Minh city: the cyclo witnesses his father's death
while working as a courier for a syndicate owned butcher shop; a helicopter
crashes on a busy city square; his drug-induced incoherent behavior
alone in the apartment. However, unlike Luis
Buñuel's use of surrealism to convey human absurdity, Tran's
use of fantastic imagery reflects the filmmaker's own poignant sentiment
on the inevitable self-destruction of his illusions towards his irreparably
changed ancestral homeland. Like the existential confinement of the
young cyclo in the empty, abandoned apartment, Tran hopelessly seeks
to recapture the elusive and ideal purity of an ethereal and haunting
lost memory.